A young female singer who found inspiration in the performances of London's drag artists has become the summer sensation of the French music scene.

This weekend sees the debut LP from Héloïse Letissier, the performer also known as Christine and the Queens, who is already behind a series of critically acclaimed hits, accompanied by some startling videos. Her rapid ascent to national prominence led to admiring profiles in French newspapers Le Monde and Libération last week but although her reflective songs and audacious creative philosophy sound about as French as it is possible to imagine, the original inspiration for Letissier's act came from England. Her English stage name and subversive attitude to the sexual conventions of the music industry bear testament to her love of British counter-culture.

After an unproductive period at drama school, Letissier came to London "in exile" in 2010 and befriended a trio of transgender "singing drag queens" in a London club. "They convinced me to attempt singing. They were my Queens," she has said, adding in an interview on Friday, "they had an incredible freedom and they showed me there is no need to check yourself because of other people."

Two years ago, her efforts were rewarded in France with the prestigious Découvertes du Printemps de Bourges award for the best new act, among other prizes.

Although she performs alone, as her alter ego of Christine, she sees herself as representing a force ranged against the cliche of the pretty pop stars. Letissier's creative holy grail, she told Libération last week, would be to be perceived by the public as "a silhouette, a presence", more than a singer.

Her act, as seen in her video for the song Saint Claude, is polished and restrained – and determinedly asexual. She wears a trouser suit and expresses herself, like Michael Jackson (one of her artistic heroes), through the precise movements of her hands and feet.

"Usually, I speak with my hands," she told French media last week. Those hands bear unnerving tattoos taken from Tod Browning's cult 1932 film, Freaks, set in a sideshow: "One of Us", one hand reads, and the other, "We accept you".

Letissier says she is full of mutable identities and the suits she wears are designed to help her neutralise any sexuality that might be projected on to her. Her sense of her own gender, she has explained, fluctuates. "I feel like a man in the morning but a girl in the evening. When I fall in love it is with a personality, not a gender," she said.

Born near Nantes in 1988, Letissier's father was a professor of English literature and her mother taught French and Latin. She played the piano from an early age and remembers an obsession with performance. Classical dance training that began when she was five ended early with a painful foot injury and modern jazz took over for a while.

"As a young woman I wanted to create a character who was outside the classic codes of seduction because I did not feel at ease with them," she has said. After studying drama at Lyon, she found she was not "comfortable" with the limitations of acting. "I did not like submitting to the artistic vision of others," she said.

When an interviewer from Le Monde recently compared her to Canadian-born French star Mylène Farmer, Letissier was not impressed either. "No, she is sex. Me, I'm not very sexualised." She has, all the same, inherited strong influences from the unorthodox history of the European cabaret and chanteuse scene, most obviously from the stage persona of the androgynous Marlene Dietrich.

And, although Letissier claims to admire modern mainstream stars, such as Kanye West and Beyoncé, she does admit that Ziggy Stardust, the non-specifically gendered 1972 incarnation of David Bowie, also fascinates her. Letissier is following a long line of celebrated male impersonators, including Vesta Tilley and the American Ella Shields, who found fame in the West End in the early 1900s.

The French singer, dancer, performance artist and composer, who is 26 this year, lives alone in the brash 19th arrondisement of Paris, near Pigalle, with her two cats and finds it hard to keep friends. She is often melancholy and says she is obsessed with death: "I've already thought about it. I have even tried it, but it didn't work," she told Libération.

"For me, real life is art on the stage; I want to disappear into it. I don't like me, but I like what I become when I make something."